What’s a Working Dad to Do?

I was on a radio show last Father’s Day to discuss the struggles men face in trying to balance work and family demands.

During the interview, the co-host, John Aberman, told a quick anecdote about a run-in he had when he was a rising corporate lawyer at a prestigious NYC firm. He was divorced and his ex-wife and his kids lived in London, so he flew there to see his kids every other weekend. After two monster weeks of work, he was heading out of the office to go to JFK one late Thursday afternoon when a more senior partner confronted him. “Where are you going?”

John explained that he’d bulked up the past two weeks to finish his work for his very satisfied client and that he was catching his flight to Heathrow to see his kids. The partner angrily responded, “Bullshit. You see your kids more than I do, and I live with mine. Besides I need you here tonight — and over the weekend.” John pushed back and caught his flight, but shortly thereafter decided to give up his career as a lawyer. Life was just too short.

This is an extreme example, but many working fathers face similar pressures to conform to a traditional gender role that insists they be “all in” for work, regardless of achievement level and regardless of family responsibilities. And this is the case despite the facts that:

Dual-income, shared-care families are far more the norm than families with a single-earner and an at-home spouse.

Today’s fathers spend three times as much time with their children and twice as much time on housework than dads did a generation ago, and

As a result, it has been reported that dads experience at least as much work-family conflict as mothers, and that in some ways, men are facing a funhouse-mirror version of women’s struggles to attain success at both work and at home.

The Flexibility Stigma Working Group at The Center for WorkLife Law at the UC Hastings College of the Law, consisting of researchers from over a dozen universities, just published a series of research studies in the excellent new issue of the Journal of Social Issues. About half of their articles focus on barriers men face in the workplace as they try to balance work and family demands. Among their findings:

While men value work flexibility, they are reluctant to seek out flexible work arrangements because of fears of being seen as uncommitted and unmanly, and expectations of potential career consequences. These fears, unfortunately, prove to be well-founded.

Fathers who engage in higher than average levels of childcare are subject to more workplace harassment (e.g., picked on for “not being man enough”) and more general mistreatment (e.g., garden variety workplace aggression) as compared to their low-caregiving or childless counterparts.

Men requesting family leave are perceived as uncommitted to work and less masculine; these perceptions are linked to lower performance evaluations, increased risks of being demoted or downsized, and reduced pay and rewards.

All in all, that’s a pretty stark set of findings. What’s a working father to do?

To me, the first step towards healthier workplace culture is to bring the issue of fathers’ work-family out of the shadows and to make it a topic for discussion. Employers won’t change if dads assume that employer hostility towards family demands is set in stone, and that they can only resort to working through holes in the system, using only informal arrangements or “invisible” accommodations.

If my generation of busy involved dads doesn’t start making change happen, company cultures will remain unchallenged, and more and more dads will have to struggle seemingly alone. But change is possible, and there are many prominent examples of workplace cultures that are supportive of work-family.

So how can we start making changes? As Gandhi said, “we need to be the change we wish to see.” If you have the security, flexibility, courage, and inclination (I recognize some may have more ability to do this at work than others), here are four things we working dads can do in our workplaces to make it easier for all of us to discuss and address our work-family concerns.

While at work, talk about your family and ask other men about theirs.

Reach out to some male work friends and start an informal group to discuss your lives outside of work. Have lunch together or grab a drink after work and talk.

Occasionally use work flexibility and let your male colleagues see you do so (e.g., tell people you are leaving early for a school event but are taking work home).

If and when your child is born, take paternity leave instead of just cobbling together a week of accumulated personal days. Many companies have an unused policy collecting dust on the shelf. Someone may as well be the pioneer.

Overall, we need to make it more normal for working fathers to discuss and address family issues. I know it is not easy to stand out. But these small steps can lay the groundwork for building more supportive workplace cultures.

Work-family is not a woman’s issue. And it’s not a man’s issue. It’s a family issue that affects us all. It’s time we started talking about it.